Yes, I know I've touched on this topic before, but not in a while and not in this forum, so I think I'll have a go at it again.
My view is that abortion is wrong. I believe that God forgives, and that one should not judge those who have abortions, because it is not our place to judge. But I do not feel that abortion should be legal. There is a page at http://clinicquotes.topcities.com which has a list of quotes from various sources on abortion, mostly from doctors and clinic workers who've peformed them. They are very eye-opening. I will include a few, and I would be interested in hearing other people's opinions on them. I will NOT flame anyone who disagrees with me, please give me the same courtesy although this is an emotional issue.
==========================================================
"I got to where I couldn't stand to look at the little bodies anymore"
--Dr. Beverly McMillan, when asked why she stopped performing abortions.
"We all wish it were formless, but its not...and its painful. There is a lot of emotional pain."
--abortion clinic worker
Quoted in "The Ex Abortionists: They Have Confronted Reality" Washington Post April 1, 1988 p a 21
==========================================================
"From May to November 1988, I worked for an abortionist. He specializes in third trimester killings. I witnessed evidence of the brutal, cold blooded murder of over 600 viable, healthy babies at seven, eight and nine months gestation. A very, very few of these babies, less than 2%, were handicapped...I thought I was pro-choice and I was glad to be working in an abortion clinic. I thought I was helping provide a noble service to women in crisis....I was instructed to falsify the age of the babies in medical records. I was required to lie to the mothers over the phone, as they scheduled their appointments, and to tell them that they were not 'too far along' Then I had to note, in the records that Dr. Tiller's needle had successfully pierced the walls of the baby's heart, injecting the poison what brought death...one day, Dr. Tiller came up the stairs from the basement, where the mothers were in labor. He was carrying a large cardboard box, and ducked into the employees only area of the office so that he wouldn't have to walk through the waiting room. He passed behind my desk as I sat working on the computer, and he turned the corner to go around a short hall. He called out for me to come and help him. the box was so big and heavy in his arms that he couldn't get the key into the lock. So I unlocked the door for him, and , pushing the door open, I saw very clearly the gleaming metal of the crematorium- a full sized crematorium, just like the one's used in funeral homes. I went back to my computer. I could hear Dr. Tiller firing up the gas oven. A few minutes later I could smell burning human flesh. Mine was the agony of a participant, however reluctant, in the act of prenatal infanticide."
--Luhra Tivis on her experience in the abortion business Quoted in Celebrate Life Sept/Oct 1994 "Where is the Real Violence?"
==========================================================
From "Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic" by Wendy Simonds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. This was a book by a pro-choice feminist who included a chapter about how clinic workers reacted to seeing fetal remains. Here are a few quotes:
"It's just- I mean it looks like a baby. It looks like a baby. And especially if you get one that comes out, that's not piecemeal. And you know, I saw this one, and it had its fingers in its mouth...it makes me really sad that that had to happen, you know, but it doesn't change my mind. It's just hard..."
"I feel some sadness [about abortions] and I think part of the problem is that we don't talk about that...we don't talk about it as much as we think about it...somehow your pro-choice stance is compromised by saying the word "baby."...We don't allow ourselves to say or think that word...."
"At nine weeks...you start seeing fetal parts. And by the second trimester it's, you know, it's a baby, and by eighteen weeks it's definitely a baby. And by like, you know, twenty-two weeks, you go in and you watch someone do a sonogram, and you're like, "Oh my." There it is just moving, moving around. And it's really hard because I always thought of abortion in terms of just the woman, just her body."
"...when you're, you know, putting a fetus's feet in over its head in a baggie, there's just this brief moment of "This could have been me," which I fundamentally believe is okay. She should have the right to choose..."
"...it looks like a baby, That's what it looks like to me. You've never seen anything else that looks like that. The only other thing you've ever seen is a baby...You can see a face and hands, and ears and eyes and, you know...feet and toes...It bothered me real bad the first time..."
"The destruction I can't deny....I wish we lived in a world where abortion didn't have to exist."
"I think the tough part was seeing actual pieces of fetus being removed..And in the beginning, yes, I remember looking, standing behind this woman's shoulder [as she performed an abortion] and thinking, "I can't do this...There's something emotionally upsetting about this..Features are discernible; you can count five fingers on a hand and five toes on a foot. You know, all the organ systems are formed. You know, you can see ears as structures, and the nose and eyes as structures...I have gotten to the point now that because I've been doing this work five months, four months, I look at it a little differently. I don't see the same things that I did. And, honestly, when I sit down to do one of these now, I am watching to be sure that I'm getting everything that I need to get. It's 'Do I have two lower extremities? Do I have two upper extremities? Is t here a spine? ...and the skull?...It does become a bit routine after a while. I don't fear it."
"I hate it when people put it together to look like a baby. I hate that...I don't want to look like it when its like that because it's like a broken doll, and that grosses me out."
From the author: "Many health workers told me they 'never look at the face' when processing tissue."
==========================================================
"After an abortion, the doctor must inspect these remains to make sure that all the fetal parts and placenta have been removed. Any tissue left inside the uterus can start an infection. Dr. Bours squeezed the contents of the sock into a shallow dish and poked around with his finger. "You can see a teeny tiny hand' he said.
--abortion clinic worker quoted in "Is the Fetus Human?" and in Dudley Clendinen, "The Abortion Conflict: What it Does to One Doctor" New York Times Magazine Aug 11 1985 p 26
==========================================================
"Abortions are very draining, exhausting, heart-rending. There are a lot of tears. Some patients turn on you...I do them because I take the attitude that women who are going to terminate babies deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry babies...I've done a couple thousand, and its been a significant financial boon...the only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman as my patient and block out the baby."
--abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves by John Pekkanan
==========================================================
From "Lovejoy: A Year in the Life of an Abortion Clinic" one worker says
"I have never denied that human life begins at conception. If I have a complaint about our society, its that we don't deal with death and dying. Do we believe human beings have a right to make decisions about death and dying? Yes we do, and those decisions are made every day in every hospital."
==========================================================
From "Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of The Abortion Wars" by Cynthia Gorney (New York: Simon& Schuster, 1998.)
"Never. I would never look down. Some of the nurses watched as he removed the tissue, but I never looked. If I looked, I would never be able to work there [the clinic]again." --Carlean Turner, Kansas City, on D&E abortions
==========================================================
In the book "Abortion: Debating the Issue" (New York:Enslow Publishing, Inc., 1995) Nancy Day quotes abortionist Dr. Ed Jones, who had worked at a Planned Parenthood Clinic for 4 years at the time of the interview, saying the following:
"This can burn you out very, very quickly...not so much by the physical labor as the emotional part of what's going on. When you do an ultraound, particularly if you have children, and you see a fetus there, kicking, moving, living, doing things that your own child does, bringing it's thumb to its mouth, and things like that- it's difficult. Then, after the procedure, sometimes we have to actually look at the specimen, and you see arms and legs and things like that torn off...It does take an emotional toll."
==========================================================
Is abortion murder? All killing isn't murder...."
--Don Sloan, MD, abortion provider, author of "Abortion: A Doctor's Perspective, A Woman's Dilemma." Quoted in "Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints" edited by Tamara L. Roleff.
==========================================================
I dismember the foetus - pull it apart limb from limb - and remove it piece by piece and two hours later I've forgotten them.
Prof. Phillip Bennett, Abortion provider.Sunday Independent, 11/8/1996
==========================================================
Berkeley Medical Journal Spring 1995 Edition The Abortionist by LeoWang
"Abortion is killing the fetus....Human life, in and of itself, is not sacred. Human life, per se, is not inviolate."
--abortionist Dr. Smith
==========================================================
"No one, neither the patient receiving an abortion, nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life..."
--Abortion provider William F Harrison, MD, FACOG, from the essay "Why I Provide Abortions" 1996.
==========================================================
"I wanted to be the world's best abortionist, for the good of my patients. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. So, after I met each patient, reviewed the medical information gathered by my nurse, examined the patient and performed the abortion, I would then carefully sift through the remains to be sure all the parts were accounted for. I had to find four extremities (two arms and two legs) a spine, a skull, and the placenta, or my patient would suffer later from an incomplete abortion...My attention was so focused on my perceived patient that I managed to deny that there were, in fact, two patients involved- the expectant mother and a very small child...I had to wonder, how can having a child be so wrong for some people that they will pay me to end its life?"
--former abortionist Dr. McMillan "How One Doctor Changed Her Mind About Abortion" Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs
==========================================================
"I walked in the laboratory every day. I saw dead babies every day for three years. If I could see fifty, I was so happy. Because, you know what? That meant I was really gonna have a good bonus in my paycheck."
---Clinic worker Hellen Pendley. Quoted by Mary Meeham in "The Ex-Abortionists: Why They Quit" in The Human Life Review
==========================================================
From Norma McCorvey's book Won By Love:
At least 80 percent of the women would try to look down at the end of the table, wondering if they cold see anything which is why our doctor always went in with the scalpel first. Once the baby was already cut up, there was nothing but blood and torn up tissue for the woman to see. When a later abortion was performed, workers had to piece the baby back together, and every major part--head, torso, two legs, and two arms --had to be accounted for."
==========================================================
My view is that abortion is wrong. I believe that God forgives, and that one should not judge those who have abortions, because it is not our place to judge. But I do not feel that abortion should be legal. There is a page at http://clinicquotes.topcities.com which has a list of quotes from various sources on abortion, mostly from doctors and clinic workers who've peformed them. They are very eye-opening. I will include a few, and I would be interested in hearing other people's opinions on them. I will NOT flame anyone who disagrees with me, please give me the same courtesy although this is an emotional issue.
==========================================================
"I got to where I couldn't stand to look at the little bodies anymore"
--Dr. Beverly McMillan, when asked why she stopped performing abortions.
"We all wish it were formless, but its not...and its painful. There is a lot of emotional pain."
--abortion clinic worker
Quoted in "The Ex Abortionists: They Have Confronted Reality" Washington Post April 1, 1988 p a 21
==========================================================
"From May to November 1988, I worked for an abortionist. He specializes in third trimester killings. I witnessed evidence of the brutal, cold blooded murder of over 600 viable, healthy babies at seven, eight and nine months gestation. A very, very few of these babies, less than 2%, were handicapped...I thought I was pro-choice and I was glad to be working in an abortion clinic. I thought I was helping provide a noble service to women in crisis....I was instructed to falsify the age of the babies in medical records. I was required to lie to the mothers over the phone, as they scheduled their appointments, and to tell them that they were not 'too far along' Then I had to note, in the records that Dr. Tiller's needle had successfully pierced the walls of the baby's heart, injecting the poison what brought death...one day, Dr. Tiller came up the stairs from the basement, where the mothers were in labor. He was carrying a large cardboard box, and ducked into the employees only area of the office so that he wouldn't have to walk through the waiting room. He passed behind my desk as I sat working on the computer, and he turned the corner to go around a short hall. He called out for me to come and help him. the box was so big and heavy in his arms that he couldn't get the key into the lock. So I unlocked the door for him, and , pushing the door open, I saw very clearly the gleaming metal of the crematorium- a full sized crematorium, just like the one's used in funeral homes. I went back to my computer. I could hear Dr. Tiller firing up the gas oven. A few minutes later I could smell burning human flesh. Mine was the agony of a participant, however reluctant, in the act of prenatal infanticide."
--Luhra Tivis on her experience in the abortion business Quoted in Celebrate Life Sept/Oct 1994 "Where is the Real Violence?"
==========================================================
From "Abortion at Work: Ideology and Practice in a Feminist Clinic" by Wendy Simonds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. This was a book by a pro-choice feminist who included a chapter about how clinic workers reacted to seeing fetal remains. Here are a few quotes:
"It's just- I mean it looks like a baby. It looks like a baby. And especially if you get one that comes out, that's not piecemeal. And you know, I saw this one, and it had its fingers in its mouth...it makes me really sad that that had to happen, you know, but it doesn't change my mind. It's just hard..."
"I feel some sadness [about abortions] and I think part of the problem is that we don't talk about that...we don't talk about it as much as we think about it...somehow your pro-choice stance is compromised by saying the word "baby."...We don't allow ourselves to say or think that word...."
"At nine weeks...you start seeing fetal parts. And by the second trimester it's, you know, it's a baby, and by eighteen weeks it's definitely a baby. And by like, you know, twenty-two weeks, you go in and you watch someone do a sonogram, and you're like, "Oh my." There it is just moving, moving around. And it's really hard because I always thought of abortion in terms of just the woman, just her body."
"...when you're, you know, putting a fetus's feet in over its head in a baggie, there's just this brief moment of "This could have been me," which I fundamentally believe is okay. She should have the right to choose..."
"...it looks like a baby, That's what it looks like to me. You've never seen anything else that looks like that. The only other thing you've ever seen is a baby...You can see a face and hands, and ears and eyes and, you know...feet and toes...It bothered me real bad the first time..."
"The destruction I can't deny....I wish we lived in a world where abortion didn't have to exist."
"I think the tough part was seeing actual pieces of fetus being removed..And in the beginning, yes, I remember looking, standing behind this woman's shoulder [as she performed an abortion] and thinking, "I can't do this...There's something emotionally upsetting about this..Features are discernible; you can count five fingers on a hand and five toes on a foot. You know, all the organ systems are formed. You know, you can see ears as structures, and the nose and eyes as structures...I have gotten to the point now that because I've been doing this work five months, four months, I look at it a little differently. I don't see the same things that I did. And, honestly, when I sit down to do one of these now, I am watching to be sure that I'm getting everything that I need to get. It's 'Do I have two lower extremities? Do I have two upper extremities? Is t here a spine? ...and the skull?...It does become a bit routine after a while. I don't fear it."
"I hate it when people put it together to look like a baby. I hate that...I don't want to look like it when its like that because it's like a broken doll, and that grosses me out."
From the author: "Many health workers told me they 'never look at the face' when processing tissue."
==========================================================
"After an abortion, the doctor must inspect these remains to make sure that all the fetal parts and placenta have been removed. Any tissue left inside the uterus can start an infection. Dr. Bours squeezed the contents of the sock into a shallow dish and poked around with his finger. "You can see a teeny tiny hand' he said.
--abortion clinic worker quoted in "Is the Fetus Human?" and in Dudley Clendinen, "The Abortion Conflict: What it Does to One Doctor" New York Times Magazine Aug 11 1985 p 26
==========================================================
"Abortions are very draining, exhausting, heart-rending. There are a lot of tears. Some patients turn on you...I do them because I take the attitude that women who are going to terminate babies deserve the same kind of treatment as women who carry babies...I've done a couple thousand, and its been a significant financial boon...the only way I can do an abortion is to consider only the woman as my patient and block out the baby."
--abortionist quoted in M.D. Doctors Talk About Themselves by John Pekkanan
==========================================================
From "Lovejoy: A Year in the Life of an Abortion Clinic" one worker says
"I have never denied that human life begins at conception. If I have a complaint about our society, its that we don't deal with death and dying. Do we believe human beings have a right to make decisions about death and dying? Yes we do, and those decisions are made every day in every hospital."
==========================================================
From "Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of The Abortion Wars" by Cynthia Gorney (New York: Simon& Schuster, 1998.)
"Never. I would never look down. Some of the nurses watched as he removed the tissue, but I never looked. If I looked, I would never be able to work there [the clinic]again." --Carlean Turner, Kansas City, on D&E abortions
==========================================================
In the book "Abortion: Debating the Issue" (New York:Enslow Publishing, Inc., 1995) Nancy Day quotes abortionist Dr. Ed Jones, who had worked at a Planned Parenthood Clinic for 4 years at the time of the interview, saying the following:
"This can burn you out very, very quickly...not so much by the physical labor as the emotional part of what's going on. When you do an ultraound, particularly if you have children, and you see a fetus there, kicking, moving, living, doing things that your own child does, bringing it's thumb to its mouth, and things like that- it's difficult. Then, after the procedure, sometimes we have to actually look at the specimen, and you see arms and legs and things like that torn off...It does take an emotional toll."
==========================================================
Is abortion murder? All killing isn't murder...."
--Don Sloan, MD, abortion provider, author of "Abortion: A Doctor's Perspective, A Woman's Dilemma." Quoted in "Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints" edited by Tamara L. Roleff.
==========================================================
I dismember the foetus - pull it apart limb from limb - and remove it piece by piece and two hours later I've forgotten them.
Prof. Phillip Bennett, Abortion provider.Sunday Independent, 11/8/1996
==========================================================
Berkeley Medical Journal Spring 1995 Edition The Abortionist by LeoWang
"Abortion is killing the fetus....Human life, in and of itself, is not sacred. Human life, per se, is not inviolate."
--abortionist Dr. Smith
==========================================================
"No one, neither the patient receiving an abortion, nor the person doing the abortion, is ever, at anytime, unaware that they are ending a life..."
--Abortion provider William F Harrison, MD, FACOG, from the essay "Why I Provide Abortions" 1996.
==========================================================
"I wanted to be the world's best abortionist, for the good of my patients. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. So, after I met each patient, reviewed the medical information gathered by my nurse, examined the patient and performed the abortion, I would then carefully sift through the remains to be sure all the parts were accounted for. I had to find four extremities (two arms and two legs) a spine, a skull, and the placenta, or my patient would suffer later from an incomplete abortion...My attention was so focused on my perceived patient that I managed to deny that there were, in fact, two patients involved- the expectant mother and a very small child...I had to wonder, how can having a child be so wrong for some people that they will pay me to end its life?"
--former abortionist Dr. McMillan "How One Doctor Changed Her Mind About Abortion" Focus on the Family, Colorado Springs
==========================================================
"I walked in the laboratory every day. I saw dead babies every day for three years. If I could see fifty, I was so happy. Because, you know what? That meant I was really gonna have a good bonus in my paycheck."
---Clinic worker Hellen Pendley. Quoted by Mary Meeham in "The Ex-Abortionists: Why They Quit" in The Human Life Review
==========================================================
From Norma McCorvey's book Won By Love:
At least 80 percent of the women would try to look down at the end of the table, wondering if they cold see anything which is why our doctor always went in with the scalpel first. Once the baby was already cut up, there was nothing but blood and torn up tissue for the woman to see. When a later abortion was performed, workers had to piece the baby back together, and every major part--head, torso, two legs, and two arms --had to be accounted for."
==========================================================
